There's someone you should meet. Her name is Ketsia, and these days you'll find her in the Gates Family Gallery on the second floor of the Hamilton Building at the Denver Art Museum.

Ketsia is pretty but approachable. She's intelligent but not intimidating. She's young, but the creases that will line her face in 20 years have taken position. She's a bit of a dreamer, and maybe a little naive, but you get the sense she has strong convictions.

You'd really like to get to know her more. But she's a painting.

"Ketsia" might be based on a real Ketsia, but the Ketsia we know is the creation of artist Daniel Sprick. She's one of about 40 men, women and children that are gathered in Sprick's solo exhibition, "Daniel Sprick's Fictions: Recent Works," which is on view at DAM through Nov. 2.

The show in essence is about the physical state of existing as a human being. Through dazzling skill in applying oil paint on board, in rendering texture, in making a two-dimensional picture surface look like a three-dimensional box of light, in transmitting how the body hangs and the face expresses, Sprick so animates his subjects that they can seem more human than actual humans walking through the gallery.

Many artists can make their subjects look real. Sprick makes you feel as if they're there.

The double portrait "Two Women" is monumental in form and execution, and its subtext has mythological proportions. It shows a large, nude woman sitting with her legs crossed and another woman, trimmer and also nude, reclining with her legs lying in the large woman's lap. Their eyes are closed. The large woman's hands rest lovingly on the other's legs. The circumstances of their relationship is left almost entirely unexplained, but the depth of it is forcefully conveyed.

Daniel Sprick turned his gaze on himself in this self-portrait, which is included in "Daniel Sprick's Fictions: Recent Works" at the Denver Art Museum. (Denver Art Museum / Special to A&E Spotlight)

More important, the painting is about bodies. Blue veins in a breast, the lines on the underside of a foot, the angle of a forefinger — these and other details describe the subjects' physical states so effectively you can almost inhabit them yourself.

Sprick, who lives in Denver, is a nationally respected contemporary realist. The photorealism he's capable of producing is thrilling. You could spend 10 minutes wondering at the details of Ketsia's teeth alone. But such qualities in Sprick are deployed not for their own sake. They serve a higher purpose. The real on the surface lets us glimpse the real underneath.

Master of his time

The museum recently opened another exhibition, a retrospective of work by pop artist Tom Wesselmann, whose interest was less in humans themselves than with the culture they conjured in late 20th century America.

Wesselmann, like Andy Warhol, was a restless experimenter with form who took inspiration from advertisements and everyday objects. Some of the most inventive works in the show — "Beyond Pop Art: A Tom Wesselmann Retrospective," which runs through Sept. 14 — are from his shaped canvas series.

One of these works shows a reclining nude woman who is implied by small shapes of painted canvas that reveal the background visible through her bent limbs. The female body the viewer perceives takes up four or five times the area the canvas actually occupies, and what we see of her appears almost entirely in our imagination.

"Still Life #60," by Tom Wesselmann, is on view at the Denver Art Museum as part of "Beyond Pop Art: A Tom Wesselmann Retrospective," through Sept. 14. (Denver Art Museum / Special to A&E Spotlight)

The show includes "Still Life #60," an enormous work that glorifies 1960s cool through the application of scale to Wayfarer sunglasses, a stick of lipstick and other items the artist represented on larger-than-life cutouts.

Wesselmann, who died in 2004, was an artist of his era. Pop art is especially susceptible to the aging process, and some of Wesselmann's work feels dated. His celebration of smoking in works that depict seductive lips and elegant streams of smoke might make a modern viewer wince, and it's doubtful he anticipated that kind of a reaction.

But while some of Wesselmann's work lacks timelessness, the retrospective is a worthy tribute to a master of his time.

Pop artist Tom Wesslmann, as is evident in "Still Life #35," took inspiration from advertisements and everyday items. His work is displayed as part of "Beyond Pop Art: A Tom Wesselmann Retrospective" at the Denver Art Museum though Sept. 14. (Denver Art Museum / Special to A&E)

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